mu - a set of tools to deal with Maildirs and message files, in particular to index and search e-mail messages.
mu [COMMON-OPTIONS] [[COMMAND] [COMMAND-OPTIONS]]
For information about the common options, see COMMON OPTIONS.
mu is the general command that shows help about the specific commands:
mu4e-internal use)
Each of the commands has its own manpage mu-<command>.
mu is a set of tools for dealing with Maildirs and the e-mail messages in them.
mu’s main purpose is to enable searching of e-mail messages. It does so by periodically scanning a Maildir directory tree and analyzing the e-mail messages found (this is called ‘indexing’). The results of this analysis are stored in a database, which can then be queried.
In addition to indexing and searching, mu also offers functionality for viewing messages, extracting attachments and creating maildirs, and searching and exporting contact information.
mu can be used from the command line or can be integrated with various e-mail clients.
This manpage gives a general overview of the available commands (index, find, etc.); each mu command has its own man-page as well.
The completions sub-command is hidden from the normal output of mu and does not have its own manpage.
$ mu completions bash|fish|zsh
You can use it to generate command-line completion files. However, note that mu already does this for you upon installation.
Some mu commands support colorized output, and do so by default when writing to a TTY (roughly, to a screen). When not writing to a TTY, for instance when redirecting the output to a file or using a pipe, the default is to not show colors.
If you do not want colors, you can use --nocolor.
If you want colors even when it is not the default, use --nocolor=false.
mu’s output is in the current locale, with the exceptions of the output specifically meant for output to UTF8-encoded files. In practice, this means that the output of commands index, view, extract is always encoded according to the current locale.
The same is true for find and cfind, with some exceptions, where the output is always UTF-8, regardless of the locale:
The index, find, cfind, move, add, remove and labels commands work with the database, while the other ones work on individual mail files. Hence, running view, mkdir and extract does not require the mu database.
mu logs to the standard logging location, which is either the systemd journal, syslog or a log file (by default, ~/.cache/mu/mu.log), depending on your system’s setup; the first that appears to be working is used.
When using a log file, it can safely be deleted when mu is not running. When running with the --debug option, the log file can grow rather quickly.
Makes mu generate extra debug information, useful for debugging the program itself. Debug information goes to the standard logging location; see mu(1).
Causes mu not to output informational messages and progress information to standard output, but only to the log file. Error messages will still be sent to standard error. Note that mu index is much faster with --quiet, so it is recommended you use this option when using mu from scripts etc.
Causes mu to output extra information, for some commands.
Causes mu to output log messages to standard error, in addition to sending them to the standard logging location.
Do not use ANSI colors. The environment variable NO_COLOR can be used as an alternative to --nocolor.
Prints mu version and copyright information.
Lists the various command line options.
This command returns 0 upon successful completion, or a non-zero exit code otherwise.
Success
No matches found. Try a different query
Database schema mismatch: re-initialize mu, see mu-init(1)
Failed to acquire lock. Some other program has exclusive access to the mu database
Caught an exception
mu-add(1), mu-cfind(1), mu-extract(1), mu-find(1), mu-help(1), mu-index(1), mu-info(1), mu-init(1), mu-labels(1), mu-mkdir(1), mu-move(1), mu-remove(1), mu-scm(1), mu-server(1), mu-verify(1), mu-view(1), mu-query(7), mu-easy(7)